Ruth Asawa’s “The Garden of Remembrance”

The Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University serves as a quiet space for reflection on a dark chapter of American history. Artist Ruth Asawa designed the site to memorialize the nineteen students who were forced to withdraw from the college in nineteen forty two due to their Japanese ancestry. These students were among the one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans sent to incarceration camps during World War Two. Asawa herself experienced this same forced removal and incarceration, an event that profoundly shaped her life and her later work as an artist.